Published Jul 8, 2003
So, as prologue, the house I grew up in was haunted (probably more on that later). One of the loci of supernormal behavior was a large room on the third floor, and probably the attic that connected to that room.
In this dream, I was living in this house with my current roommates. I had the whole third floor (a bedroom, the big haunted room, and a bathroom) to myself. We were planning to move out to a new, smaller, ranch-style house, with just one shower that we used to wash cans of vegetable soup down the drain. The smaller house had gray and white wooden walls and yellow tile in the bathroom; the ceilings were low and the house was dark, and the dirty beige carpet just made it more so. Both houses were owned by the same landlord, our old landlord, a nice guy named Bob Schock, and the small house was much cheaper. Hey, it’s a dream, don’t knock it.
I went back to take a shower and brought a friend with me. As we climbed the stairs to my floor, my friend saw a little girl at the top of the stairs. I told her not to, but she followed the girl. The girl grabbed her hand and pulled her through the large room and into the attic. A door had appeared in the back of the attic leading to a supernatural world. I followed her in, running after the two of them. As I ran into the attic, the world changed from the beige carpet, beige paint, sunny openness of my house to a wood-paneled complex of mostly-open rooms; mahogany railings and cheap pine walls lay next to each other, with doors and windows in the walls promising a variety of services offered to the undead. The effect was much like a Las Vegas casino, with a warren of walkways inside a building, and faux buildings along the walls.
Turning a corner, I found my friend seated, waiting in line at a processing center to be permanently trapped in this ghost world. I grabbed her hand and we ran for the door out. Down the stairs we went and out of the house to get away.
But when we got outside I realized we were still trapped in the ghost world. While it apparently wasn’t surprising that the house stood alone on the Scottish moors, the fact that there was a storm rolling in showed that we were not free. We linked up with some other Sunday hikers and decided to walk out of the moors in the rain.
And then I woke up. It was 9:30am. Aren’t you supposed to have these dreams at 3am so you can wake up and be scared and alone? Sunlight streaming through the windows don’t do it for the frightening part.